More from George Macdonald

 

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"I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you," he answered, "but there is no provision in you for understanding it.  Not merely, therefore, is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature of it is inapprehensible by you.  Indeed I but partially apprehend it myself.  At the same time you are constantly experiencing things which you, not only do not, but cannot understand.  You think you understand them but your understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not surprised at them.  You accept them, not because you understand them, but because you must accept them: they are there and have unavoidable relations with you!  The fact is, no man understands anything; when he knows he does not understand, that is his first tottering step--not toward understanding, but toward the capability of one day understanding.  To such things as these you are not used, therefore you do not fancy you understand them.  Neither I nor any man can here help you to understand but I may, perhaps, help you to believe!"

"Paradox and Transformation"

A friend sent me a link to this excellent paper  co-authored by Nancy C. Maryboy of the Indigenous Education Institute, physicist David H. Begay and Lee Nichol of the Nyingma Tibetan Institute.  This section struck me as particularly significant:

"There is ample evidence of empirical thinking in all Indigenous cultures, an aspect of thinking in which the narrowed vision of problem-solving is vigorously exercised. The crucial point here is that the narrowed empirical vision is occurring in dynamic relationship with the wisdom matrix, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously."

My study of Goethe in the light of Pierre Hadot's take on ancient philosophy has suggested to me that, though Western consciousness has become individuated to the point of pathology, there exists a living stream of Western consciousness that has avoided this pitfall.   The consciousness structure that is emerging from this stream would, perhaps, look a good deal like Maryboy et al's model of indigenous cognitive processes in which "deeper holistic knowings naturally 'govern' the more limited empirical knowings."

Just for Fun

Musee Des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

--W.H. Auden

More on Beauty

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I have been thinking more about this subject of beauty, trying hard not to fall prey to either of what I see as the Scylla and Charybdis of the abstraction of Platonism or the materialism of the evolutionary psychologists. Specifically, I have been asking myself why a fine painting depicting an ugly person is not less beautiful than an equally fine painting of a beautiful person, even if our animal selves find the beautiful subject much easier on the eyes. The tentative answer that I have come up with is that beauty is the living essence of a thing. Its presence is determined by how much access we have through our perception of a phenomenon to the phenomenon's inherent dynamism. This would mean that beauty is always with us if we are able to discipline our consciousness to perceive it. It also suggests that capturing beauty in art is a matter of capturing the aliveness of things. I believe that, if we are fully present to a phenomenon in any moment, we will in a flash become able to see that it is not reducible to the relatively solid objects that normally settle into our minds—just as so often we fail to see our children growing until we look back and notice that they have grown but, when we do take notice, growth itself becomes present for us in a way that it had not been a moment before.

All that we perceive is, if we are only able to become aware of it, a spiraling dance of qualities never at rest but art seems, paradoxically, to show us a frozen moment unendingly the same. It seems to show us something captured forever as in amber or formaldehyde but, if it does its job, what it will in fact show us is a subject so truly portrayed that it appears to live and breathe only for itself in a state in which no explanation or description could do it justice. When we are able to achieve that shift in consciousness that comes to us from surrendering to the artist's vision, a subject artfully depicted will appear to us as a product of absolute necessity, as it never would appear if we were engaged in a utilitarian relationship with it in the world (can we call this new relationship an I-Thou relationship rather than an I-It relationship?).  We see, by virtue of the artist's depiction, that this phenomenon could never be anything other than what it is and what it is is true and right, "sinless and all-sufficient."

If we are able look at something for itself and not for ourselves, if we take out all the distractions of whether or not we like it, whether or not we need it or want it or if it is just in our way, whether or not it stimulates us in a way that we find pleasurable or provides us with an enjoyable frisson of fear or disgust, then we can accomplish the rare feat of re-producing the object in our imaginations without reference to our grasping, judging selves. Though I am not entirely sure that I can do it justice, I can say that this moment produces such intimacy, more than intimacy- identification!, that we become able to see the phenomenon in all its potential (whether or not that potential is ever to become fully manifest).  We are able to see that what something is can never be fully expressed within the limits of time and space.

A witness who perceived in this way, would not think (at least at first) to wonder whether or not she would have rescued Brueghel's Icarus or like the actual figures in the painting, failed to notice the splash when he hit the water. Instead of identifying with the rash, unfortunate youth or with the plowman who goes on with his work, instead of judging either of them, such a witness would find herself allowing the figures of the painting to inhabit her consciousness-- horses, sheep, shepherds, ships, sunsets and the shock of the plunge, all that she surveyed would begin to take root in her mind so completely that she would be one in essence with, not just each figure in the scene, but with all of them, with the scene itself as a dynamic unity.  Now, she can grow with the scene as its nature tells her that it would surely grow.  As Goethe expressed it when he described his process of "exact sensorial imagination," she would become capable of "animating, developing, extending and transforming" what she saw and, thus, become able to see with her inner eye, not the frozen moment of the unregarded fall, but the scene's inherent dynamism, its perfect aliveness.   She would see that none of its figures are separate, that there is no real division between horizon, sea and land and that all, even the distant buildings, are in some way awake to and within themselves.  All of the manifest and potential stages of a phenomenon, from abortive to stunted to fully in bloom, participate in its dynamic essence, in what Goethe called the Archetypal Phenomenon and Bortoft described as the "omnipotential form."  When we see from this wholeness, this infinitely dynamic wholeness, then all is beautiful.



I cannot resist adding, though it disrupts the flow of my narrative, that, when Goethe described to his friend Schiller the experience of seeing the Archetypal Phenomenon, Schiller replied that Goethe was not "seeing" but "thinking." Goethe later wrote that "there is a difference between seeing and seeing; the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connection with those of the body, for one otherwise risks seeing and yet seeing past a thing."

More Rilke and Link to Article

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes. 

--Rainer Maria Rilke

"Angels to Radios: On Ranier Maria Rilke "

Possibilities

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Below is today's selection from Charles Williams' New Christian Year. Thanks to this website that is worth visiting every day.
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It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it. In every man there is latent the highest possibility, one must follow it. If God does not wish it then let him prevent it, but one must not hinder oneself. Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm and confidence in God. I have not dared: that is a woeful thought, a torment in eternity.

--Søren Kierkegaard: Journals

Interdisciplinary Hype?

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Here, Jerry A. Jacobs objects to the push for interdisciplinarity (or the more fashionable label, "transdisciplinarity"). A recent experience at a transdisciplinary conference suggested to me that many proponents of the approach don't quite know what the word, whichever word you choose, should mean. There will be no transcending of the disciplines unless each invites a new, more integrated epistemological basis for its work. Artists, theologians and philosophers must no longer choose between fearing or revering the pronouncements of science (or look to them to bolster their intuitions) but must become, themselves, systematically investigative thinkers. While, scientists must develop their aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities so that they can come to know the world as it displays itself in its fullness.

This does not mean an end to specialization. It means striving, within specializations, to maintain a cosmic view, one that never loses sight of the fact that the disciplines are a secondary expression of the world, rather than a lens through which we "see" an abstract world that is somehow more real than the one we know through our senses and intuition. How does the saying go? "I can explain but then you would understand my explanation and not what I said." A poem and its explication are not commensurate. Neither are a star and its chemical description. All that we know is grounded in the incommunicable. Without this fundamental understanding, there is a limit to how subtly one intelligence may communicate with another. With this understanding, the possibilities are limitless.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ugly-Beautiful

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If a person has experience and a deeper insight into the processes of the universe, there will hardly be any phenomenon accompanying these processes that does not appear to him, at least in some of its aspects, as pleasant. And he will look upon the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasures than upon all the imitations of them that sculptors and painters offer us... and there are many such things, which do not appeal to everyone, only to that person who has truly familiarized himself with nature and her workings.

--Marcus Aurelius

Rediscovering the World

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...it could well be that ancient wisdom-- whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic or Epicurean-- was intimately linked with a relationship to the world; but isn't the ancient vision of the world out of date? The quantitative universe of modern science is totally unrepresentable, and within it the individual feels isolated and lost. Today, nature is nothing more for us than man's "environment"; she has become a purely human problem, a problem of industrial hygiene. The idea of universal reason no longer makes much sense.

All this is quite true. But can the experience of modern man be reduced to the purely techno-scientific? Does not modern man, too, have his own experience of the world qua world? Finally, might not this experience be able to open up for him a path toward wisdom?

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The utilitarian perception we have of the world, in everyday life, in fact hides from us the world qua world. Aesthetic and philosophical perceptions of the world are only possible by means of a complete transformation of our relationship to the world: we have to perceive it for itself and no longer for ourselves.

--Pierre Hadot from Philosophy as a Way of Life

"To Portray Rather than Explain"

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All except the quotes from Goethe are quoted in Pierre Hadot's essay "The Sage and the World" from Philosophy as a Way of Life
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Natural structures constitute both the initial and the final reference point of all imaginable beauty, although beauty is human appreciation. Since man himself belongs to nature the circle can be easily closed, and the feeling man has of beauty merely reflects his condition as a living being and an integral part of the universe. It does not follow from this that nature is the model of art, but rather that art constitutes a particular instance of nature: that which occurs when the aesthetic act undergoes the additional process of design and execution.

-Roger Caillois

[The artist's] progress in the observation and vision of nature gradually lets him accede to a philosophical vision of the universe which allows him freely to create abstract forms... Thus, the artist creates, or participates in the creation of works, which are an image of the creative work of God... Just as children imitate us while playing, so we, in the game of art, imitate the forces which created and continue to create the world... Natura naturans is more important to the painter than natura naturata.

-Paul Klee

Art no longer imitates visible things; it makes things visible. It is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Paintings show how things become things and how the world becomes a world... how mountains become in our view mountains."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The desire for knowledge first stirs in us when we become aware of significant phenomena which require our attention. To sustain this interest, we must deepen our involvement in the objects of our attention and gradually become better acquainted with them. Only then will we notice all manner of things crowding in upon us. We will be compelled to distinguish, differentiate and resynthesize, a process which finally leads to an order we can survey with some degree of satisfaction.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is what they all come to who continually harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only half of experience.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Article on Education and the "Fetishisation of Change"

Excerpt: Sadly, the ceaseless repetition of the idea that the past is irrelevant desensitises people from understanding the influence of the legacy of human development on their lives. The constant talk of ceaseless change tends to naturalise it and turn it into an omnipotent autonomous force that subjects human beings to its will. This is a force that annihilates the past and demands that people learn to adapt and readapt to new experiences. From this standpoint, humans do not so much determine their future as adapt to forces beyond their control.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
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We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Trying to Make More Sense

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There are some things from my previous post titled "On Making Sense" that I would like to look at more closely. In the earlier post, I conjectured that order is not what we see but how we see. This is because the human mind "sees" by coalescing coherent phenomena out of the vast amount of sensory data that is relentlessly available to it. It is, therefore, impossible to see incoherence because the act of seeing is, itself, the act of making coherence in the world. We can, however, see things that do not make satisfactory sense, things that leave us wondering what we have just seen. Some of these things, such as a lamppost in a wood or a talking lion, can be explained if we are able to obtain enough information about how these things came to be as they are. Because we understand lampposts, because we understand woods, talking and lions, we need only expand our worldview enough to include a context in which they are able to exist in a previously unknown relationship to each other.

The ability to experience phenomena is all about the relationships among qualities. The experience of particular qualities (color, texture, flavor, size, etc.) in particular relationships (spatial and temporal) equals the experience of a particular phenomenon. Typically, we encounter a world in which these relationships make it easy for us to form a coherent picture. Sometimes, however, the world seems strange. In addition to the odd and unexpected, an experience that has the potential to make sense eventually, there is another category of incoherence that never settles easily into our minds. It is the kind of incoherence we experience when we look at an M.C. Escher sketch in which we are provided with enough qualitative data to recognize certain objects, such as a staircase, but the spatial relationship is all wrong. In this case we are able to see something without making complete sense of it. We are able to see something that could not exist in the world that we typically inhabit. In this instance, our sense-making abilities let us down. (Cubist paintings and Gestalt images, such as the duck-rabbit do not fall into this category because we are able to see, not an incomplete coherence, but two or more kinds of coherence at the same time. This kind of mental flexibility, in my opinion, allows us a peek behind the veil of every day sense-making into a kind of thinking that is less dependent on rigid spatial and temporal relationships. We are able to make more sense out of the images, not less. It is significant that we can only do this when we learn to relax. Rigid expectations of what we will see prevent us from seeing what we do not expect.)

In my previous post, I also said, in so many words, that we participate in the coming-into-being of our world through the act of seeing (coherence-making). I also suggested that the order that is thus created is the source of all beauty. Later, I would like to explore why I believe that such order is real and not merely an ephemeral product of a mind that exists cut-off from what it perceives. For now, however, I would like to examine this idea of beauty. If beauty is an expression of order and order is the mechanism by which we see everything, why are some things more beautiful than others? Why are some things ugly? It occurs to me that, if we look at the various ways a thing can be unbeautiful then we can begin to understand both what beauty is and what our sensitivity to beauty reveals about the subtle and sophisticated ways in which humans are able to relate to phenomena. I am prepared, therefore, to offer a tentative list of the various kinds of ugliness. Before I do that, however, there is one view of what makes something beautiful or ugly that I need to, if not get out of the way, then at least attempt to address in a way that allows us to look beyond it.

Evolutionary psychologists, such as Daniel Dennett, tell us that we have been wired by evolution to find certain traits attractive because the perpetuation of these traits helps to ensure the survival of our species. We are not drawn to mates with signs of disease because such an attraction would inhibit our ability to procreate. We are drawn to puppies with big eyes, however, because this feature reminds us of infants and the desire to care for big-eyed babies keeps our species afloat. It is possible to extrapolate from this theory (and I am not accusing all evolutionary scientist of extrapolating in this way) to suggest that, when we see regularity and proportion in our environment or even majesty in the big, protective mountain range that surrounds our village, what we are experiencing is a hypertrophy of the instinct that draws us to similar features in our mates and fellow members of our tribe.

No doubt, some of this goes on when we perceive beauty but to reduce all notions of coherence, proportion and loveliness to these drives is reductionist and anthropocentric.  It suggests that beauty is, indeed in the eye of the beholder, that it exists in us and not at all in the world. I believe, however, that there is enough of the world in us and enough of us in the world to allow us to judge the world on its own terms, on terms of kinship that do not reduce us to mere products of the world or the world to a mere product of our presence in it.  This is how we are able to discern the difference between what is simply appealing and what is fully beautiful. This is how we are able to see Michelangelo's David as beautiful in the same way as a snow-capped mountain is beautiful, not just in the way a supermodel is beautiful. 

Having said that, I am now ready to share my "ugly list," or at least as much of it as I have been able to devise. The first category is found in both the human and non-human world. The others are found only in art or artifacts.

*First, there is what I would like to call the sublimely ugly. The French expression is belle-laide or "ugly beautiful." (In French, the phrase is usually applied to women who are interesting to look at but not conventionally beautiful.) A phenomenon that is ugly-beautiful may strike terror in our more primitive selves but, if we are sensitive enough, there will be no denying that it has been formed just as it should have been and that a magnificent example of such a phenomenon is magnificent indeed, even if it will not be winning any beauty contests. I recently had a thrilling experience of sublime ugliness while watching an exotic lobster (at least I think it was a lobster) in a fish tank. I could not help shuddering but neither could I look away, so true did the creature and its alien movements seem to its own nature.

*Second, there is the meretricious. The meretricious, the cheap and the tawdry, is not meant to be appreciated but to be used. (It may be objected that religious icons are meant to be used as an aid to contemplation rather than to be appreciated for their own sake and, while in my opinion, this does distinguish icons from other kinds of art, this is a topic for another discussion). Borrowing from the aesthetics of James Joyce (echoed in Joseph Campbell's "The Way of Art"), I can say that a creation of this kind (always human-made) is by its nature either pornographic (designed to awaken avarice or lust in the audience) or didactic (designed to arouse hatred or disgust). Such depictions are poorly rendered. Little sensitivity is applied to the relationships among qualities. Certain features are exaggerated in an effort to stimulate (or over-stimulate) the baser instincts of the user. You might find an example of art in a video game but its presence will be incidental to the game's purpose. You might find an artist who believes he has created something fine when what he has created is, in fact, rather cheap. Such a person has failed to understand that the human relationship with art is not manufactured but ordained. Art does not do what we want it to do. It is what it is.

It should be noted, however, that, just as it is possible to see two images in a gestalt figure, it is possible to use art in such a way that the beautiful is reduced to the meretricious in the mind of the beholder. It is also possible to use the meretricious in a way that encourages a desire for the beautiful. An adolescent, hungry for a sense of something greater, may begin with pulp fantasy novels but make her way to the much finer work of George Macdonald or even Shakespeare when the original material no longer feeds her growing mind. Perhaps this category, more than any other, tends to be mixed and open for debate. We are animals, after all, and we are much more.

*Finally, there is the surreal. In surreal works of art, some relationships among the qualities are deliberately distorted so that we begin to doubt our perceptions. These pieces function as a kind of experiment in our relationship with the qualities that make-up phenomena. Like an Escher drawing, they test the limits of our coherence-making abilities, leaving us with a feeling of deep uneasiness. The surreal fails as art when the audience concludes that all coherence-making is suspect, that if everything does not make sense then nothing does and there is no sense to be made. In all cases, the surreal should be approached with caution. Remarking on the "aberrations of the formally representational arts," Owen Barfield writes that…

in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way experienced the world that he represents [such as when Dali recorded an image that was present in his mind as he woke from a dream]. And, in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move toward seeing the world in that way and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.

Two kinds of beautiful that are sometimes confused with the surreal (and to a lesser extent with the sublimely ugly or the meretricious) are the fantastic and the absurd. The genuinely fantastic and genuinely absurd are not ugly. Such art is true to nature in the sense that the phenomena depicted have what Tolkien called "an inner consistency." The fact that the relationships are unexpected but nonetheless natural (meaning that it seems to us that they could exist), forces us to reach beyond our thought habits to find a deeper order. For those familiar with the Harry Potter stories, it makes it possible for us to become muggles who are able to recognize wizards and witness their magic. 

In the medium of drama, this quality of inner consistency explains why reading Pinter can feel more disturbing than reading Pirandello. A Pirandello play is typically true to its own world, even if the audience (and the characters) are left with the task of figuring out what that truth is. We know that we are in the process of making sense and, even if we never completely manage it, we are not caused to doubt that there is sense to be made. In a Pinter play, on the other hand, the story proceeds as one might expect until an inconsistent element is introduced to make us wonder if we had been right about what we thought had been going on all along.  With Pirandello, we unconsciously assume that inductive reasoning is required to discover the laws of the world of the play.  With Pinter, our minds are set on automatic until they are jarred into conscious activity by an absurd surprise.

I am certain that there is much more to be said about beauty and ugliness and much more to discover about all of the subtle ways we can participate in the beauty of the cosmos. For now, I hope that, if nothing else, it has become clear that beauty is truly present for us only when we begin to wake-up to all that passes before our senses, when we begin to watch ourselves watching. The more we improve our reliability as witnesses to beauty, the more Beauty becomes alive in the world.

 

Suggestions for Further Reading:

"The Way of Art" by Joseph Campbell, available in Inner Reaches of Outer Space
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

"On Fairy-Stories" or "Tree and Leaf" by J.R.R. Tolkien available in The Tolkien Reader

Now Available!

J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life

A series of three illustrated lectures from the Wasatch Gnostic Society

On Making Sense

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I remember, as a small child, being fascinated with anything that was just beyond the grasp of my developing consciousness-- the cover illustration of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends in which two children seem to peer over the crumbling culmination of the sidewalk at the edge of the world or the puzzling behavior of "my son John" who went to bed with his stockings on, one shoe off and one shoe on" (the possibility that he had been drinking before he fell asleep was still well beyond me). Like all children, I couldn't let these odd images go. I relished their strangeness and, to this day, I feel a reverberation of wonder when I recall anything that then caused me confusion. I remember what it felt like to feel my mind growing. I still love that feeling-- at least as much as I love anything else.

This article from the October 5 New York Times reports on the suggestion by researchers that encountering what seems to be a nonsense scenario, something that could not be expected to exist in the everyday world, sharpens the mind by causing it, through anxiety or just an innate desire to make sense of things, to work harder to find patterns in what it perceives. Even if the perceiver is unable to make satisfactory sense of the original experience, subsequent experiences are sharper and subtle patterns more visible. Thus, order comes out of apparent chaos. This got me thinking.

I do not believe that it is possible to perceive utter nonsense. Order is not what we see but how we see. It is the organization of the data that allows our minds to congeal objects and events out of what would otherwise be the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of raw sense experience. As thinkers such as Rudolf Steiner and Henri Bortoft have pointed out, thinking is involved even in the act of simple seeing. We would not be able to see (make a phenomenon out of) incoherence any more than we would be able to read (make a word out of) a string of consonants. Stumbling upon a lamppost in a wood (as young Lucy did when she entered the world of Narnia) is unexpected, yes, certainly improbable but not impossible. It is not strictly nonsense but, rather, not-yet-sense. Even in a story, magic wardrobes and talking animals make sense within the context of the story. Discovering how they make sense is very good for us. It tells us something essential about ourselves and the world. It tells us that there are other worlds hidden within our own.

Any incongruity, the lack of those ready categories that allow us to navigate an experience without actually having the full available experience, has the potential to cause us to suspect a deeper order, to cause us to suspect that the world is more wonderful than we had supposed. (Of course, the wonderful world is always with us but, when we are preoccupied with avoiding a collision with a tree, we need only register its presence, location and a vague sense of its properties. The thrilling coarseness of its bark and the delicate vein pattern of its leaves are of no consequence). The gift that comes to us when we read Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" or Ionesco's "The Lesson" is that we do understand it on some level, that we do find order there. What we find, in fact, is the pervasiveness of order, itself. It is an opportunity to wake-up a little to the inherent sensicalness of the cosmos which is the source of all beauty.

The name that has been given to this process of waking up is deautomatization. In The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science, Henri Bortoft uses the term, borrowed from psychologist Arthur Deikman, to describe a process of coming to see the thought habits by which we organize our perceptions then learning to see beyond them. You can think of it as paradigm-busting. "Philosophy," according to Owen Barfield, "is the most wakeful part of a people's consciousness" and it has historically been the task of philosophers to "get outside of the plane of consciousness in which they normally lived." It has, in other words, been the task of philosophers to reveal a deeper order by, as Goethe expressed it, opening up "a new organ of perception." It is time that we all learned to see ourselves as philosophers.

These thoughts raise other thoughts. What first comes to mind is Tolkien's theory of "subcreation" which is a way of communing with the qualities that make up phenomena by using our imaginations to separate those qualities from our habitual, usually ego-based way of encountering them. I believe that this process, one that we would think of as artistic, has much in common with Goethe's scientific method of "exact sensorial imagination" and that both are ways of unlocking the extraordinariness of the ordinary. My second thoughts are about Rupert Sheldrake's contention that the laws of nature, including I assume those that govern our ability to perceive, should be regarded more as the habits of nature. Since our consciousness is part of nature and, in fact, participates through its organization of sense data in the creation of nature as we know it, I cannot help asking if a human ability to transcend thought habits might not amount to something like the ability of nature to transcend itself. Deautomatization, indeed.

These, however, are complex questions and will have to wait for another post. I am still trying to find a way to say a lot in a small space and I am afraid that I have not succeeded so far. Much is implied, little explicated. I'll just have to keep working at it. Perhaps the beauty of a blog is in the opportunity to watch it evolve.

Recognitions

Recognitions
by W. S. Merwin

Stories come to us like new senses
a wave and an ash tree were sisters
they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost
they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of
as family resemblances features they held in common
the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance
of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree
in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree
recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it
and they wrote to each other every day
without knowing where to send the letters
some of which have come to light only now
revealing in their old but familiar language
a view of the world we could not have guessed at
but that we always wanted to believe.

They Were Magicians

From "Raven's Appearance: The Language of Prophecy" by Peter Kingsely


"There are many, many things that I learn and have learned from these Greeks who lived two and a half thousand years ago. But the key, the one most important thing, that I have learned from them is that there are two ways of talking—just as there are two different ways of perceiving. There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did."

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Just the Facts?

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According to this article, Massachusetts public schools, inspired by the theories of E.D. Hirsch, have performed an education reform “miracle” by implementing knowledge-based standards for students and holding students to those standards through rigorous testing. As the article explains, Hirsch has long maintained that “learning how to learn” is not enough. Students must face the world armed with facts. Context (the hermeneutic circle?) matters as much as text, and without a shared cultural context, some of us grow up without the ability to grasp what the rest of us are talking about.

I agree wholeheartedly that context matters and that facts, far from “lifeless” but enlivened by their very nature with history, language and implied worldview, are indispensible but I worry that a simple-minded reliance on cultural transmission through the authority of a knowledgeable teacher is dangerous because, with it, there comes the risk of forgetting what education is for. Do we teach our children so that they may preserve our culture or so that they may transform it? Perhaps we should aim for something of both, preserving that which deserves to be preserved while transforming or transcending the rest. More importantly, we should ask what we get when we receive a cultural transmission—through art, literature, the findings of science or from someone who has been privileged with an experience that we have not.

Peter Kingsley, a contemporary interpreter of Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles believes that culture as we know it was a gift to the philosophers from the gods. It was not discovered or developed but received by a few human beings with the capacity to stretch human consciousness enough to make room for the gift. Furthermore, he argues, the time has arrived for us to receive something more. When we encounter nature, for instance, or a work of art with an open mind and heart we take into ourselves (perhaps through a deep identification) something that ultimately defies analysis, something that cannot be taught in the way we tend to think of teaching. This “something,” this breath of the essence of what things truly are, is as inexhaustibly knowable as the universe itself. We can never get to the end of it. Therefore, it can never be measured. There is more to see in every vision than is immediately apparent in the vision itself. It is our sight that needs adjusting. As philosopher Jean Gebser puts it, “Every ‘novel’ thought will tear open wounds.” In any cultural tradition (and I can only speak with experience if not authority about the Western tradition), we have in our hands a sometimes clumsy, occasionally precise scalpel with which to perform the operation.

The passing along of information and its context (and, perhaps, the two are not as distinguishable as we believe) is an essential part of teaching but learning, true transformative learning, takes place when we are able to cultivate enough silence, attention and humility to integrate more and more of what the words—and the sights and the sounds and smells, the taste, the touch and the senseless intuition—wordlessly suggest to us about ourselves and our world. It is not the information, itself, or the skills for uncovering the information that changes us but our thirst for knowledge and our knowledge that the thirst was never meant to be fully quenched.

By the way, I am not aware of any research data to back this up but it seems quite likely that cultivating silence, attention and humility will raise your SAT scores.

At this point, all of this must seem more poetic than legitimately argumentative (though perhaps that is not a bad place to start) but it is these ideas that I would like to begin to tease out through a careful look at the works of Goethe, Steiner, Hadot, the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield and Williams), the literary critic Erich Heller and others. I’ll just have to see what happens next.

When the Heart is Really Alive or On Becoming a Fool

"Of course you see a pigeon," rejoined the raven, "for there is the pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.--I wonder now what heart is that dove's mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!"

"How can a pigeon be a prayer?" I said. I understand, of course, how it should be a fit symbol or likeness for one; but a live pigeon to come out of a heart!"

"It MUST puzzle you! It cannot fail to do so!"

"A prayer is a thought, a thing spiritual," I pursued.

"Very true! But if you understood any world beside your own, you would understand your own much better.-- When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts are strong happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker:-- "Here is one of my thoughts: I am thinking it now!" that is a prayer-- a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.-- Look there is another!"

This time the raven pointed his beak downward-- to something at the foot of a block of granite. I looked and saw a little flower. I had never seen one like it before, and cannot utter the feeling it woke in me by its gracious, trusting form, its colour and its odour as of a new world that was yet the old. I can only say that it suggested an anemone, was of a pale rose hue and had a golden heart.

"That is a prayer-flower," said the raven.

"I never saw such a flower before!" I rejoined.

"There is no other such. Not one prayer-flower is ever quite like another," he returned.

"How do you know it is a prayer-flower?" I asked.

"By the expression of it," he answered. "More than that I cannot tell you. If you know it, you know it; if you do not, you do not."

"Could you not teach me to know a prayer-flower when I see it?" I said.

"I could not. But if I could what better would you be? you would not know it of YOURself and ITself! Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!"

But I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever seen before; therefore I knew I must be seeing the shadow of the prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart listening to the flower."

-- From Lilith: A Romance by George Macdonald